The Vernacular Sonnet and the Afro-Modernist Project

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s previously ignored blues sonnets from the early 1940s, which open up a new perspective on the trajectories of African American modernist writing. In these little-known sonnets, Hughes revived the formal experimentation of the twenties by bringing together high-modernist and vernacular elements. The chapter traces the transformations of this “synthetic vernacular” (Matthew Hart) in the work of the outstanding poets of the post-war period, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden. It shows how these poets made the sonnet a crucial—if overlooked—laboratory for the Afro-modernist project that shaped African American literature from the 1940s into the 1960s.

Hayden, Robert

Robert Hayden was made poet laureate of Senegal in 1966 and ten years later became America’s first black poet laureate. He was acclaimed as “People’s Poet” early in his career, but he was largely ignored by the American literary establishment until late in life. In his poetics of history and his nuanced representations of black life, Hayden’s art showed that the African American experience was quintessentially American, and that blackness was an essential aspect of relentlessly heterogeneous America. As he figured it in his late-in-life poem, “[American Journal],” national identity was best metaphorized in “bankers grey afro and dashiki long hair and jeans / hard hat yarmulka mini skirt.” Hayden’s archetypal efforts to demonstrate the kaleidoscopic quality of both black and American identity produced an art that transcended propagandistic categories of race and nation, and pathed the way for a large cadre of late 20th and early 21st century poets who, like Hayden, understand themselves to be simultaneously black and American, but ultimately human.

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

The image featured on this issue's cover depicts a 19th-century Greek Orthodox church in the Anatolian town of Derinkuyu. Decades after the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey that forcibly deported the town's Christian residents, the church would be converted into a mosque. This process is examined in the article by Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Robert Hayden, and Aykan Erdemir, discussed below, but the photograph also resonates with the themes of diaspora and minorities that run through most of the articles and essays in this issue.